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Kaffeepause #1

I feel like starting a new series of posts on my blog. I spend so much time drinking coffee and consuming some sort of news or literature or mostly, let's be honest, videos on pop culture, that I want to write it down somewhere. So, this is me going against the concept of my own blog. This series of posts which I named coffee break (how original, eh?) will be a place for all things I am consuming while sipping tea or enjoying coffee. I am still a college student, so I take many coffee breaks throughout my day. I have given up feeling guilty about my day to day life that is filled with many (seriously, many) free time. I am not super lazy or anything. I just use a lot of hours of my day reading and watching cool stuff. Or if I'm up for it and have cash to spare, baking cakes and muffins. Anyways, let's get down to "business".

Podcasts
Podcasts guide me through my day. I wake up, check my phone, open the app and put on some new episode of my subscribed podcast channels. If I can't get through them during my morning routine I use my subway rides to school and/or the hours of my day spend with household and cooking. On mondays I get my weekly doses of This American Life. Listening to the sweet voice of Ira Glass is making up or, depending on the story theme, increasing any sunday blues of the previous day. (sunday blues doesn't ring a bell? Read this to understand.) My other saviour in life is, and always will be, Terry Gross. I cannot express my love for Fresh Air in words that will make sense to anyone. I am just thankful for the day I found out about the workings of podcast.

Books & Movies
So this week I have spend reading Bad Feminist, an essay collection by Roxane Gay, triggered by an episode of Slates daily podcast (called ABC: The Bad Feminist). Slate's Audio Book Club is a new discovery for me, and based on this episode, I really like it. My favorite quote so far? "If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you."

Also I have started re-reading Jonathan Tropper's This is where I leave you. I went to see A most Wanted Man, the last movie Philip Seymour Hoffman did before his tragic death, at the local cinema Abaton and was surprised and overly excited to see a crime movie that has been set in Hamburg. Although it was a late saturday matinee (midnight magic!) I couldn't stop myself from watching This is where I leave you the movie. I mean, Tina Fey, Adam Driver and that funny dude who starres in every decent American comedy in one neat package? I just had to. Plus Jonathan Tropper wrote the script for the movie himself, did ya know that? I felt I was in really good hands and was able to watch one of my favorite books being turned into a movie. And I was not disappointed. In fact I was so happy about it, that I started reading his book again. That's right, at 3am in the morning. Meaning: I managed to read 2 1/2 pages.

Magazine
Joel Stein is back in TIME's awesome column with his take on activism for feminism. I just can't get enough of all that feminist talk and since Emma Watson's speech at the UN conference, HeForShe has become a real conversation starter (especially on the web - next to Renee Zellweger's transformation of course). His column titled "On becoming a better Feminist" was funny as hell. His writing is one of the reasons I read TIME magazine backwards - starting with 10 Question interview, continuing with The Culture and diving into the hot topics.

Netflix
Yup, I did it. I signed up for Netflix and gave into my TV and movie obsession. What a nice surprise when 1 out of 10 movies I search for are actually on Netflix. My recently watched list consists of Aziz Ansari's Buried Alive Tour, The To Do List, He's just not that into you, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and the first two episodes of Fargo. All very funny, pleasing movies. To get some emotionally charged movie experience with an extra pinch of confusion I watched Palo Alto. The movie adaptation of the book written by talented James Franco was as dark and dream-like as I imagined it to be. Just like with Franco's short stories I was taken back to my teenage years which, honestly, did not look anything like Teddy's or April's. But I was taken by the emotional mess and seemingly aimless story line and it definitely kept me awake a while. I'm well into my twenties but still enjoy watching and reading about the struggles of becoming an adult. I'm ether just processing adulthood or I feel distanced enough to look and enjoy from afar - haven't figured out which one of these profiles I fit best to.

It's getting late, and I have more stuff to read/watch/think/cry about. So, 'till our next coffee!